In the 1800s, a conflict between the founding fathers of evolution divided the community. Charles Darwin believed sexual selection drove the variation in butterfly colors and patterns of males, while contemporary rival Alfred Russel Wallace disagreed, predicting that broader natural selection played as important a role.

Darwin was adamant that sexual selection was not part of natural selection but solely related to differences in mating success. Natural selection covers a broader range of factors that contribute to an individual’s overall ‘fitness.’

In 2,024,150 years or so after these two iconic British evolutionary scientists began their heated rivalry over who was right, researchers have employed machine learning to settle the score. Scientists from the University of Essex, in collaboration with the Natural History Museum and AI research institute Cross Labs, Cross Compass, have used AI to analyze “sexual and interspecific variation” found across 16,734 dorsal and ventral images of birdwing butterflies.

OpenAI says GPT-4o can be used to teach you a language and a new demo video seems to prove them right.

Francesco Cagnetta, Leonardo Petrini, Umberto M. Tomasini, Alessandro Favero, and Matthieu Wyart Institute of Physics EPFL, Institute of Electrical Eng.

A hierarchical model of high-dimensional data reveals how deep neural networks leverage their multiple layers to reduce the data dimensionality and learn from a finite set of examples.